Diane Hendricks, president of roofing supplies ABC Supply, recently topped Forbes' latest list of “The Richest Self-Made Women” for the seventh consecutive year with a net worth of $20.9 billion.
Hendricks, 77, grew up on a dairy farm in Osseo, Wisconsin, before building ABC Supply with a roofing contractor and her late husband, Ken Hendricks, in 1982.
ABC Supply generated $20.4 billion in revenue last year and has more than 900 locations, according to Forbes.
How did Diane Hendricks change your life?
In an interview with Forbes Last year, she revealed that at age 10, her passion for working in the city and her parents' work ethic on the farm made her dream of her own career.
She became pregnant at age 17 and finished her senior year of high school while living at home.
Three years later, she filed for divorce from her high school sweetheart and worked odd jobs as a single mother while building a career in real estate.
“That's when I really started to consider a career, a career that I had always dreamed of having, which was to be in business,” Hendricks said.
She married her husband in the 1970s and built her Beloit-based company, which reached $1 billion in annual sales for the first time in 1998.
Hendricks is still based near Beloit, which has fewer than 37,000 residents.
It has transformed many historic buildings and old businesses in Beloit, spending millions of dollars on local projects to redevelop abandoned properties and attract new businesses to the state, according to Forbes.
In 2017, Hendricks opened a local career center to host skills workshops for middle and high school students, on topics such as coding and construction, to expose teens to the “value of a job.”
